Hitler's Panzer Armies on the Eastern Fron (29 page)

Der Russenflieger über uns sehr viele,
Sie suchen uns im Tiefangriff zum Ziele,
Wo bleibt Professor Messerschmitt?
Wir machen sonst hier nicht mehr mit!

There are so many Russians above us,
They dive low to make us their targets,
Where is Professor Messerschmitt?
We’ll make do down here without ‘im
¹⁴

Red Army counterattacks grew in intensity, but with little more than Leningrad militia and factory new tanks driven by the workers who built them to throw into the fight, Reinhardt’s veterans held on despite heavy losses. Von Leeb had two panzer divisions across the Luga, the last natural barrier before Leningrad, now barely 100km to the northeast. Soviet defenses were correspondingly weak and disorganized.
¹⁵
Could the Germans pull it off?

The answer it seems is no, they could not. The only formation in the Ostheer that could have kept up with the XLI Panzer Corps, brought it relief and combined with it to march on Leningrad was Hoepner’s other half, LVI Panzer. But von Manstein was over 150km away from the Luga
bridgeheads – straight-line distance; there is no telling how much space separated the two when swamps, enemy and unmapped dead-end trails are taken into account. Nor could Reinhardt help von Manstein. The latter’s 8th Panzer Division had become dangerously strung out on the road from Ostrov to Novgorod. Badgered by Stavka over its handling of the defense of greater Leningrad, Northwestern Front chief of staff Lieutenant General NF Vatutin developed a counterattack by the resuscitated 11th Army against the vulnerable and at times completely cut off LVI Panzer. On 15 July, the 8th Panzer, essentially in a single-file column on a narrow forest track near Stolcy, was separated from the rest of von Manstein’s corps when hit on three sides by the 10th Mechanized Corps plus parts of the 21st Tank and 70th Rifle Divisions. It hunkered down in a division-sized Igel close to Stolcy to await reinforcement. That came 24 hours later in the form of a regiment from the Panzer army reserve, SS Totenkopf, and later from elements of the 3rd Motorized, involved in its own struggle near Gorodishche. By 17 July, the 8th Panzer had broken out to the west, a tactical retreat for the proud panzers. During the battle, 8th Panzer lost 70 out of 150 panzers, damaged or destroyed. The crisis took four days to master, required commitment of many panzer army assets and even the Sixteenth Army’s I Corps to stabilize.
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While putting neither Fourth Panzer nor von Leeb’s drive on Moscow in mortal danger, Vatutin’s counterstroke did divert scarce German resources and cause consternation up and down their chain of command.

Barely one month into Barbarossa, during the second half of July, the same command paralysis struck Army Group North that has already been mentioned previously in regard to Center and South. Hitler’s attitude to von Leeb’s conduct of the campaign waxed and waned, generally corresponding to Hoepner either pulling off another successful panzer raid or sitting and waiting. In fact, the Führer even made a quick visit to see von Leeb on 21 July, which was generally viewed as a tremendous disappointment by members of the army group command group. A combined operation with Third Panzer Army against Leningrad at this point had been assumed as early as the previous December. Halder fought this idea since he believed it would siphon off resources from his pet project: the assault on Moscow. He schemed to bolster his argument by sending his operations deputy, and so-called panzer expert Lieutenant General Paulus to Army Group North. As would happen almost one month later when Halder tried to use Guderian against Hitler, Paulus returned in full agreement with the commanders on the scene; Halder’s plan had backfired. As laid out in the various Führer Directives, plus the discussions and studies that surrounded them, Hitler ultimately concluded von Leeb could not go it alone. In the end the high command reached a compromise and
Hoepner would receive temporary help in the form of Hoth’s XXXIX Panzer Corps.
¹⁷
This half measure predictably produced only partial results. One has to wonder instead, what would have become of the northern theater if the Wehrmacht had been fully committed as it was in the south when it sent all of Second Panzer to Kiev?

While the German high command deliberated and von Manstein parried in isolation, Reinhardt stewed. Von Leeb could not choose whether to strengthen one flank or the other in order to create a Schwerpunkt; in the end he resolved not to decide and left his forces as they were. For the last two weeks of July, after taking the Luga bridgeheads in such a brilliant coup, his men merely occupied space, fighting back Soviet counterattacks and swatting giant mosquitoes. In one day, 6th Panzer fired 150,000 rounds defending its hard-won gains. By the end of the month, Reinhardt’s diary is full of comments such as ‘This is dreadful . . . the decisive opportunity has passed’ and ‘More delays. It’s terrible .. .’.
¹⁸
He tried to resign over the failure to rush Leningrad when his panzer corps was 100km distant and Soviet defenses were negligible. Reinhardt’s bold move at Ivanovskoye, just east of Porechye, anticipated Model’s action at Novgorod Severesky weeks later and hundreds of kilometers south, except for one critical point: the absence of resolute leadership above that could exploit the opening. Meanwhile, through the end of the first week of August, Red Army defenses received reinforcement including fourteen rifle and four cavalry divisions plus numerous brigades and regiments and militia (DNO) formations.
¹⁹
The defenders also had a new leader, Marshal KE Voroshilov, who infused them with a determination to win.

After five delays in fifteen days, on 8 August, reinforcement, supply and weather conditions had improved so that von Leeb’s assault of the Luga River Line could begin. He had been substantially buttressed by the Luftwaffe: Luftflotte One, VIII Fliegerkorps and elements of Luftflotte Two. Hoepner began the attack with Reinhardt on the left, with 1st Panzer and 36th Motorized charging out of the Sabsk bridgehead, the 6th Panzer and 1st Infantry at Ivanovskoye and 8th Panzer, recently taken from von Manstein, in reserve. Moving out in driving rain, they hit well-prepared defenses interspersed in deep woods, with mutually supporting man-made and natural obstacles. On the second day of the offensive the two lead panzer divisions began to work together and the Soviet cause suffered accordingly. The breakthrough moment came when 1st Panzer punctured the Red Army lines, and swung behind the enemy forces holding 6th Panzer. As Raus remembered that day:

On 10 September, the bulk of 6th Panzer Division advanced along the road toward the northern bridgehead. I detached some elements
to mop up the remaining Russian forces on the plateau west of Krasnogvardeysk, while others finished rolling up the enemy’s forest position that forced us to keep a strong flank guard the previous day. In this manner the entire assault sector south of the Leningrad Line was cleared of the enemy before noon. Along the northern edge of the forest area alone, 40,000 Soviet mines had to be disarmed and removed.
²⁰

After a further two days, Reinhardt broke out from the woods that generally followed the Luga and into the relatively open country leading to Leningrad, now only 40km to the northeast. Hoepner’s right wing, von Manstein, did not do so well against the 41st Rifle Corps; weather, terrain and defenders all conspired to slow LVI Panzer for another fortnight. The commanding general of the Polizei Division (not yet called SS) died in combat, and von Manstein lost his only other mechanized outfit, 3rd Motorized, when Hoepner reinforced success by shifting that division to Reinhardt.
²¹
This shifting of forces, reinforcing the Schwerpunkt, was all critical to the blitzkrieg, and served to keep the Soviets off balance.

The Soviets had completely lost control of the battle on the most direct axis of advance on Leningrad and against Hoepner’s Schwerpunkt. The Luga Line, upon which the defense hung its hopes, delayed Reinhardt barely four days. When Leningrad Front commander Lieutenant General MM Popov shifted forces to deal with this threat he gave von Manstein an opening. Ideally, Hoepner would now reinforce success and keep the LOG on its heels, tumbling back towards the great metropolis. However, on von Leeb’s far right a Soviet counterattack diverted the attention of the senior German leadership, just when it should have been fixed on Lenin’s city. On 12 August, the 34th Army (eight divisions, later reinforced to twelve) struck the weak and exhausted X Corps (Sixteenth Army) south of Staraya Russa. Within 48 hours they had punched a hole nearly 100km deep and 60km wide. At about that same point, von Leeb took two motorized infantry divisions, SS Totenkopf from his own reserve, and 3rd Motorized, at the time preparing to assault the town of Luga (100km south of Leningrad), and redirected them to Staraya Russa. These units soon arrived and stabilized the situation. At Rastenburg Hitler fretted and Halder fumed: the first wanted to dispatch a panzer corps to the scene, the second railed against overreacting to such pinpricks. As might be expected, the dictator won this debate and on the 16th, the XXXIX Panzer (General of Panzer Troops Rudolf Schmidt, 12th Panzer, 18th and 20th Motorized Divisions) began to transfer from Hoth’s Third Panzer Army. By the 18th, X Corps seems to have mastered its situation with the help of I Fliegerkorps
and probably no longer needed to be rescued. Further, a day later, long before Schmidt’s arrival, von Manstein had completed preparations for a counterattack during the night and smashed into the overextended 34th Army’s left flank. Within four days they encircled four rifle divisions and the threat to Staraya Russa and the 16th Army’s lines of communications had passed. The situation stabilized but at a terrible cost: the last real chance von Leeb had to attempt to march into Leningrad. For the price of one infantry army Stavka derailed Hitler’s best opportunity in the north: the Germans weakened Reinhardt’s promising effort, turned von Manstein 180 degrees and brought up XXXIX Panzer too late to make an impact. Blitzkrieg theory and practice suffered a crushing blow as a flank attack caused Hitler and von Leeb to lose their nerve just when Hoepner and the Sixteenth Army had begun to make progress against the Luga Line.
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With von Manstein sent southeast as part of Sixteenth Army, Reinhardt continued on toward Leningrad as Hoepner’s sole representative. From now on, XLI Panzer took part in a relatively uncoordinated, three-pronged attack against the city: Reinhardt with the support of Eighteenth Army coming from the west, XXXIX Panzer and Sixteenth Army to the south, and the Finns attacking from Karelia. For Hoepner, this required a slower and more deliberate approach than normally associated with the blitzkrieg. Von Leeb had promised him XXXIX Panzer after the battles along the middle Luga, but later changed his mind. Reinhardt’s men would go it alone when the final assault on Leningrad began at 0930 on 9 September. The whole weight fell on Reinhardt (left–right: 36th Motorized, 1st and 6th Panzer), attacking out of the southwest corner of the German line, with 8th Panzer in reserve. According to Hitler himself, the attack would not go all the way into the city, but only as far as the last defensive positions; the city would be starved to death instead of being conquered outright. In the direction of the Duderhof plateau, 36th Motorized quickly achieved surprise and success, and 1st Panzer moved adroitly behind and to the right. The 118th Motorized Infantry Regiment captured the old tsarist barracks and nearby Hill 143. The distance to Leningrad was barely 10km. But with 6th Panzer occupied to the south and von Leeb jealously holding on to 8th Panzer, Hoepner could not build his Schwerpunkt large enough or fast enough. Subordination of XXVIII Corps to the panzer army did not help to the degree anticipated. Fourth Panzer units in the lead enjoyed success again on the 10th, but as before, the 8th Panzer could not exploit.
²³

On that same day, Hitler’s order arrived for von Leeb, telling him to dispatch XLI Panzer to the Moscow sector. This only motivated Hoepner to try harder during his last days in Barbarossa’s far north. Though supported all the way by VIII Fliegerkorps, however, the most he could accomplish was the
conquest of Pushkin by 1st Panzer and the Polizei Division on 1 September. The Soviet defenses, under Zhukov since the 11th, stiffened, with brand new T-34 tanks rumbling out of the factory at Kolpino and straight into the fighting. The 6th Panzer had entrained for Army Group Center on 15 September, 1st Panzer left four days later and the 36th Motorized and corps headquarters on the 20th.
²⁴

Reinhardt’s departure left Army Group North with one panzer corps, XXXIX, on the Leningrad front. Although it had a couple of flashes of glory, von Leeb’s flawed campaign ultimately failed to isolate the city completely or to subdue it. Clearly, part of the blame also goes to Hitler, with his changing priorities and guidance and to the Reich’s co-belligerent, Finland, which did not have ‘total war’ aspirations and so did not contribute fully. As with the entire army group, Fourth Panzer fought what the field marshal called ‘a poor man’s war’ with only one panzer army of only two corps. In terrain mostly unsuited for mechanized operations, Reinhardt’s men struggled even though blessed with a bungling enemy commander. The very nature of Leningrad insured it possessed an essential feature of a blitzkrieg objective: a massive army defending it, ripe for the taking by the skilled panzer leader.
²⁵

Unfortunately for the Germans, Fourth Panzer Army was not the weapon, and von Leeb was not the commander, required for such daring success. Although Leningrad surely suffered, it never fell. However, Fourth Panzer Army was an operational weapon, although not in the sense of the other three. It never participated in the huge, six-digit encirclement battles, but on more than one occasion threw open the door to the USSR’s second city. It created opportunities that neither Hitler, Halder nor von Leeb could exploit. After the departure of Hoepner and the panzer army, the entire northern theater settled down to a three-year tug-of-war.